We’re proud members of the Sustainable Business Council and the Climate Leaders Coalition having joined the latter in 2019 with a commitment to reduce our emissions and work with our suppliers to reduce their emissions as well.
LIC’s Chief Executive Wayne McNee is on the advisory board of the Sustainable Business Council and passionate about New Zealand, especially our primary sector. He believes we can be world-leading in our management of impacts on the environment, and create real consumer and farmer value as a result.
LC supports the Council’s vision that by 2050 New Zealand is thriving in a carbon-neutral environment and is committed to making a meaningful contribution towards delivering on this vision.
With the support of MPI, we’re progressing our seven-year Resilient Dairy programme to better detect and evaluate animal health and wellbeing traits to further improve the environmental performance of farms.
To further support sustainable farming through climate change, LIC has identified a genetic variant for improved heat tolerance in cattle and has a breeding programme to develop high genetic merit dairy animals carrying this variant. Its important work intended to help reduce the amount of heat stress in dairy cattle, particularly with increasing temperatures predicted through our changing climate.
Emissions and energy
Thanks to funding from New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, we’re testing young bulls for feed intake and enteric methane emissions to potentially breed lower methane emitting cows - and help farmers meet their 2050 emissions targets.
As a signatory of the Climate Leaders Coalition, we’re committed to measuring LIC’s greenhouse gas emissions and publicly reporting these on an annual basis. In the future we anticipate sharing our results in June of each year, aligning our reporting with LIC’s financial year.
Travel targets
At a travel level, we’ve recorded the following:
2019/20: Emissions from air travel
LIC’s emissions associated with air travel were 774.62 tCO2e.
2019/20: Emissions from road travel
LIC’s emissions associated with road travel were 3102.44 tCO2e
Electricity use
2019/20: Electricity use across our New Zealand sites
LIC’s emissions associated with electricity use were 0.57 tCO2e.
We are continuing our work to refine our measures, benchmarks and future targets that will guide LIC’s improvements in these areas as part of our mantra of always improving.
Our intent is to reduce our direct (road and air) and indirect (electricity) carbon emissions year-on-year, for the next two years (from 2020). We will use the data gathered and the lessons learnt during that time to set a science-based target that contributes to New Zealand being carbon-neutral by 2050.
